Friday, October 11, 2013

A Hundred Years of Chocolate Cake.

Today,
especially for the bakers amongst you, I am going to give you three recipes for
chocolate cake from over a period of a hundred years.

First,
from Miss Leslie's Lady's New
Receipt-book (Philadelphia, 1852) a recipe involving some rather laborious
work to scrape the compressed cacao and to beat the butter-sugar mixture until
creamy, the egg whites until stiff, and the yolks until thick and smooth:

Chocolate Cake.

Scrape
down three ounces of the best and purest chocolate, or prepared cocoa. Cut up,
into a deep pan, three-quarters of a pound of fresh butter; add to it a pound
of powdered loaf-sugar; and stir the butter and sugar together till very light
and white. Have ready fourteen ounces (two ounces less than a pound) of sifted
flour; a powdered nutmeg; and a tea-spoonful of powdered cinnamon—mixed
together. Beat the whites of ten eggs till they stand alone; then the yolks
till they are very thick and smooth. Then mix the yolks and whites gradually
together, beating very hard when they are all mixed. Add the eggs, by degrees,
to the beaten butter and sugar, in turn with the flour and the scraped
chocolate,—a little at a time of each; also the spice. Stir the whole very
hard. Put the mixture into a buttered tin pan with straight sides, and bake it
at least four hours. If nothing is to be baked afterwards, let it remain in
till the oven becomes cool. When cold, ice it.

And from almost fifty years later, a rather
no-nonsense, very basic cake from an English newspaper, Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper (London, England), on Sunday, November 19,
1899

Chocolate Cake.

Half
a pound of flour, quarter of a pound of sugar, quarter of a pound of butter,
two eggs, three ounces of chocolate powder. Beat the butter and sugar together
till the latter is dissolved, then beat in each egg separately. Mix the baking
powder with the flour, and beat all together well, then add the chocolate
powder and bake in a moderate oven.

And the grand finale – a “new
type of chocolate cake” that won a prize in the third annual national Pillsbury
baking contest in the USA for a Vassar-graduate turned housewife in 1951. The
story comes from the New York Times
of December 12, 1951.

A recipe that rings a
new change on that old favorite, chocolate cake with chocolate frosting won
$25,000 and a model General Electric kitchen yesterday for a 39-year old mother
of two small boys, Mrs. S. P. Weston of La Jollie, Calif.

Starlight
Double-Delight Cake, as it was called by Pillsbury Mills, which gave the top
award in its third annual baking contest, calls for making a basic mixture of
cream cheese, sugar, and chocolate, half of which is used in the cake batter
itself, and the other half in the frosting. Even a kitchen novice will
recognize that such a method represents something entirely new in home baking.

A graduate of Vassar
College, class of ’34, Mrs. Weston, who wore a two-piece flaming red dress,
said her main job now was “keeping house and minding my children.” Before her marriage
she was a researcher at Solar Aircraft and a school teacher, and once she won
an automatic washing machine in a soap contest. Asked her plans for using her
award, she replied in a wide-smiling daze, that she just didn’t know.

Starlight Double-Delight Cake.

2 (3-oz.) pkg. cream
cheese, softened

½ cup shortening plus
one-fourth cup of [recipe says milk, but this appears to be an error - from the
instructions, this is meant to be shortening]

½ teaspoon vanilla
extract

½ teaspoon peppermint
extract

6 cups (pound and half)
sifted confectioners’ sugar

¼ cup hot water

4 oz. melted chocolate

2 cups Pillsbury Best
enriched flour.

1 ½ teaspoons soda

1 teaspoon salt

3 eggs

¾ cup milk

1.Cream together till fluffy the cream cheese, half-cup
shortening, vanilla and peppermint extract. Blend half of the sugar into this
mixture. Add the hot water alternately with the balance of sugar. Blend in the
chocolate.

2.Sift together the flour, soda, and salt.

3.Combine the remaining fourth-cup shortening and half the
creamed chocolate-cheese mixture (two cups.) Mix thoroughly. Blend in the eggs,
one at a time. Beat for one minute.

4.To this mixture add alternately with the milk the sifted dry
ingredients (flour, soda, salt.) Begin and end with the dry ingredients. On an
electric mixer, use low speed.

Hi Anonymous. there were no oven thermomenters in the past, so cooks got very good at judging the temperature of their ovens. A large cake could take a few hours in a slow oven, I think, as with Christmas Cake.

Helpful information. When I am looking for the recipe of birthday cakes luckily I have discovered this blog accidentally, and I’m surprised why this accident didn’t took place earlier! I bookmarked it.

Helpful information. When I am looking for the recipe of birthday cakes luckily I have discovered this blog accidentally, and I’m surprised why this accident didn’t took place earlier! I bookmarked it.